Also included are poems, short stories, an array of Eiseley's absorbing observations on the natural world, and his always startling reflections on the nature and future of humankind and the universe.

    He perceives innovations in development to have evolved in ancestral organisms where the germ line was not closed to genetic variation arising during the course of ontogeny.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

    Its central idea is that the nervous system in each individual operates as a selective system resembling natural selection in evolution, but operating by different mechanisms. By providing a fundamental neural basis for categorization of the things of this world it unifies perception, action, and learning. The theory also completely revises our view of memory, which it considers to be a dynamic process of recategorization rather than a replicative store of attributes. This has deep implications for the interpretation of various psychological states from attention to dreaming. Neural Darwinism ranges over many disciplines, focusing on key problems in developmental and evolutionary biology, anatomy, physiology, ethology, and psychology. This book should therefore prove indispensable to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in these fields, to students of medicine, and to those in the social sciences concerned with the relation of behavior to biology. Beyond that, this far-ranging theory of brain function is bound to stimulate renewed discussions of such philosophical issues as the mind-body problem, the origins of knowledge, and the perceptual basis of language.

    "Carroll has to his credit an immense amount of useful labour in writing the book and will probably corner the market for a vertebrate paleontology text for the rest of this century." Nature

    Presenting an evolutionary perspective on many areas of ecology, this book, includes new information on speciation, metapopulations, self-deceit, experimental ecology, modern comparative methods, null models, landscape ecology, macroecology, biodiversity and genetic engineering, equilibrium economics and other aspects of applied ecology.

    Bylinsky's journey through time and space gives us a scientific view of what life might be like on uninhabited planets of the galaxies -- how the evolutionary push of life might respond to different physical requirements. Bylinsky even speculates on what creatures might have dominated Earth had conditions here been somewhat different. "What can be so interesting as the story of life's slow and magnificent development in a complex universe?...With verve and imagination...Bylinsky's telling is successful and timely." --Isaac Asimov